Superspud Me

Voigt, the head of the Washington State Potato Commission, was furious about a stain on the reputation of potatoes. The U.S.D.A. had singled out white potatoes as the only vegetable excluded from a program that funnels federal dollars to low-income pregnant women and their children. The implication was that the government does not deem white potatoes a healthful food.

In a larger story about the exclusion of potatoes from school lunches across the country, The Wall Street Journal mentioned Voigt’s protest diet. (This was one of two strange tidbits in the article. The other was that the National Potato Council promotes the tuber as a “gateway vegetable.”)

I called Voigt up to ask him about his reverse “Supersize Me” stunt. He said that after 20 potatoes a day for 60 days, his weight, cholesterol and blood sugar were all down. He lost 21 pounds. But at what cost? No butter, no cheese, no sour cream, no toppings at all on his potatoes.

For two months, Voigt ate them dressed only with cooking oil and seasonings — oregano, salt, pepper and anything that didn’t add nutritional value. “Tabasco sauce was a gray area,” he told me. “But I decided to add it.”

His children, ages 6 and 9, delighted in playing food cop. “My wife went to all this trouble making potato ice cream with just potatoes, artificial sweetener and cocoa,” he said. “And then my kids started looking at the labels on the cocoa powder and they decided it wasn’t allowed.” Too much added calcium and fat.

Voigt’s children allowed him one spoonful of the potato ice cream, just to try it. “And that was fine, because after tasting it that’s all I wanted to have, anyway.” His usual daily preparations included roasted, mashed and fried potatoes.

In the long run, anyone who restricts his diet to potatoes would die of a Vitamin A deficiency, Voigt’s doctor told him. And Voigt is careful not to promote this regimen as a fad diet. He just wanted to make the point that white potatoes are wholesome, he says. With President Obama on a state visit to Ireland, was he hoping for some sort of presidential endorsement for the potato? “I hadn’t thought of that,” he said. “But Obama had a beer summit and a Slurpee summit, so why not a potato summit?”

Once he had made his point, Voigt found the diet difficult to break. “My doctor warned me it might make me nauseous to eat other foods at first,” he said. At midnight on the 60th day, Voigt peered queasily into his fridge. “It was sort of like the Stockholm syndrome. It was hard for me to break that trust with the potato and eat something else.”

Bruce Grierson wrote this week’s cover story about Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who has conducted experiments that involve manipulating environments to turn back subjects’ perceptions of their own age.Read more…